I'll Be Right Here
by Alexabee
Summary: [Reposted] While in District 2, Katniss gets a call from Prim informing her that the level of tracker jacker venom in Peeta's blood is not going down and she needs to return to District 13 ASAP. A bittersweet love story wherein Katniss forsakes her role in the rebellion as The Mockingjay in order to be by Peeta's side. Keywords: romance, hospice, one-shot, canon divergence


_This is a one-shot canon divergence that takes place after a hijacked Peeta has attempted to strangle Katniss. It was originally written for a Prompts in Panem challenge in early 2013 using the prompt of the movie "E.T. The Extraterrestrial". Please note that it's rated M for character death. _

* * *

"Katniss," Prim's voice crackles over the line. "Hello?"

"Hello? I think we have a bad connection. Can you hear me, Prim?"

"Katniss!" she bursts from the static. "You have to come back. It's Peeta."

Plutarch, Haymitch and my sister have been calling me with daily updates on his condition from where he's being held in Thirteen's underground medical facilities. Meanwhile, I've been here in the mountains of District Two, trying to keep myself busy with the rebel cause so I don't have to think about what I've left behind.

A hijacked Peeta.

A Peeta who hates me.

I tell myself that I need to forget about the boy with the bread, because he's not there anymore. He was hijacked and turned into a mutt by the Capitol – a mutt specifically engineered to kill me.

But the more I try to run away from it, the more I find myself longing for the old Peeta, with his kindness and steadiness and those protective arms that kept me safe from nightmares. It took losing him for me to truly appreciate just how loving he really was. In the quiet recesses of my mind, I still cling to the happier memories I have of him, like when we worked side-by-side on the plant book, or that last, electrifying kiss we shared on the beach during the Quell.

But that was before the Capitol captured him and injected him with tracker jacker venom, destroying who he was. As I think about it, my fingers automatically rise to my neck and graze the faded bruises left over from his attempt to strangle me.

That was the last time I saw him face-to-face.

"Katniss, are you listening?"

"Yes." I wasn't.

"You have to come back. Today. Right now," Prim insists.

"Is Peeta better?" I blurt out, betraying my little kernel of hope that the doctors in Thirteen have found a cure for his hijacking. Last I was told, they were trying some experimental treatment that paired large doses of morphling with soothing images of home. Maybe it worked.

The line crackles again, and for a moment I fear I've lost the connection. "Prim?"

"—doing any better."

"What? The line cut out. What did you say?"

"Katniss," she sighs. "He's not doing any better. He's… he's worse. He slipped into a coma late last night and his brain activity on the EEG completely dropped off. The doctors thought that the tracker venom was slowly purging itself from his system, but…" she trails off.

"Prim?" I ask frantically.

"It's still at almost lethal levels and his body is shutting down. The venom has attacked his brain and spinal cord. They're doing a total blood transfusion to see if they can reverse some of the damage, but even if he survives, the doctors can't guarantee that any of his brain function will return."

I fall silent, clutching the phone's receiver so tightly that my fingers turn white. When I fled to District Two, I thought I was prepared for this. I thought that it'd even be for the best if he died. Now, faced with the very real possibility of losing Peeta, I know that I am not ready to give up yet.

I'm not ready to let go of the boy with the bread.

We both know what all this talk of blood transfusions and brain activity means, but Prim is the one who says it first.

"Katnis… Peeta is dying."

* * *

His lips are completely white.

I peer down through the window in the lid of the cold chamber, where Peeta's practically lifeless body is being kept. They had to lower his core temperature to perform the transfusion, and most of the venom is now out of his system, but his brain activity still hasn't resumed.

And at this point, the doctors don't expect it to.

"Why is he covered in plastic?" I finally choke. It makes it seem like he's already dead. Prim comes up beside me squeezes my fingers.

"Don't worry. It's just an oxygen blanket. It's helping him breathe."

I stand there for a long time with my hand pressed to the window of the cold chamber, staring down at Peeta's pale, motionless face just inches below. He doesn't look pained or tormented, just like he's sleeping peacefully. He looks like the old Peeta. The one who shared my bed on the train.

It's when I find myself admiring the long blond lashes that curl against his ashen cheeks that I finally break down into tears. I already lost him once, to the hijacking. I don't think I can bear to lose him again.

"Peeta," I whimper. "Please wake up." Then I start to sob his name over and over again, my tears dripping onto the little window that separates us. "Wake up, Peeta, wake up!" I bawl, slapping my palm against the glass.

Prim and one of the doctors try to take me by the shoulders and guide me away, but I wrench myself free from their grip, throwing my body against the lid of the cold chamber and refusing to let go.

"Just let her stay," Haymitch finally barks from the corner of the hospital room. "The boy is as good as dead. He's not going to do her any harm now. Just let her stay."

* * *

Three days later, I get word that Gale and the rebel troops have secured a strategic stronghold in District Two - a mountain nicknamed "The Nut" - and President Coin officially relieves me of my Mockingjay duties. The war has practically been won and they no longer need me.

I could care less.

I'm busy fighting a different sort of war.

The doctors here in Thirteen wanted to keep Peeta's body in the cold chamber so that his organs could be harvested after his imminent death. But as his only living relative - I am still his fiancée, after all - I flatly refused to allow it. There's no way that I would let Peeta be dissected piece by piece to be used in their experiments.

So now he lies in a regular hospital bed, covered in tubes and wires and hooked up to a ventilation unit which breathes for him. The doctors repeatedly tell me that his brain activity, even though it spikes from time to time, is still consistently below detectable levels and that the chance of him waking up grows smaller and smaller each day.

And I, in turn, stubbornly tell them that I don't give a damn about odds and statistics, and that I am still not about to take Peeta off life support.

Maybe it's selfish, but I'm not willing to give up hope just yet.

I never leave Peeta's side. My mother and sister bring me food and Haymitch brings me updates about the war. He says that rebel forces have closed in on the Capitol and are now holding Snow under siege in his own mansion.

At night, after the lights have automatically dimmed, I break the nurses' rules and curl up in bed with Peeta, wrapping my arms around him protectively in the same way that he did for me in the cave. "Did you hear what Haymitch said?" I whisper in his ear, making sure his blankets are tucked in snugly around his thin shoulders. "The war is almost over. Soon we can go home."

Finnick is the only one who seems to share my hope that Peeta will wake up. He and Annie come to visit me at odd hours, sometimes in the middle of the night just so we can have the privacy to talk.

"Just give it time. He's been through a lot. Remember when he died after walking into the force field? He's survived two arenas! Who says he won't bounce back this time, too," Finnick points out. His reasoning makes me smile for what feels like the first time in years. Yet Annie remains strangely silent – perhaps less optimistic about Peeta's recovery, knowing first-hand what horrors he faced while being tortured in the Capitol.

I don't think I want to know what those horrors were. For that reason, I refuse to allow Johanna Mason to even enter the room.

But most of the time I'm alone with Peeta and the sounds of the machines and monitors keeping his body alive. To stay sane amidst all the beeping and clicking, I talk to him. I tell him that I still have the pearl and the locket he gave me, and then I run these objects over his fingers in hopes that he can feel them. I tell him about how I dragged Buttercup all the way to District Thirteen in my game bag, and how the people here were so starved for entertainment that they flipped out when I showed them the "crazy cat" game. I remind him of the time we spent sitting in my bed while I recovered from my foot injury, working on the plant book together and eating those delicious cheese buns, and I promise to someday take him to the lake where my father taught me how to swim. And at night, when no nurses are around, I sing.

Just softly.

I curl up against his body and sing him _The Valley Song_ and _The Hanging Tree_ and _Wind and Rain_ and _Fiddle Coal Creek_ and even the lullaby that Prim loved as a little girl. Anything that comes to mind.

Sometimes, as I'm singing, I'll see his monitors spring to life for a second, and his ventilator will make a strange sound, as if he's fighting against it. In these moments I'm both hopeful and frightened, because I don't know which version of Peeta will be returning if he does come back to me.

But it doesn't matter, because he never does.

* * *

On the eighth day of being by Peeta's side, Prim arrives to relieve me. She tells me to go take a shower and a nap. "I'll stay with him and make sure he's okay. I promise," she adds, settling into a chair at his bedside.

I'm too weary to protest.

The shower is luxurious and I instantly fall asleep afterwards, but I'm woken up a short time later by a loud whooping in the hallway outside the compartment. When I open the door to see what's going on, I'm met by a crush of people, all flowing up from the stairwell and headed for the exit that leads to the outdoor compound.

"What's going on?" I ask, catching the attention of a woman with a scarred face. "Where is everybody going?"

"Didn't you hear the announcement? Snow has surrendered!" She laughs as she's pulled back into the crowd. "We won! Snow has surrendered!"

Later that evening when I return to Peeta's side, I cuddle up under the blankets, nuzzle my face into his neck and tell him, in a small, awed voice, of the day's big news. "No more President Snow. No more Capitol. No more Hunger Games. We can go home now, Peeta."

Visions of rebuilding District Twelve float through my head. Not just any District Twelve, either - a free one, a utopian one. With no whipping post and no starvation and where Peeta's children, someday, will be able to play freely without ever knowing the horror of a reaping.

The games are officially over. For good.

"We can really go home."

* * *

Sometime in the night, I'm started awake by a loud, long beeping. I panic, lifting my face from Peeta's shoulder to find that his breathing mask has fallen away and he's choking on the tubes that are still lodged halfway down his throat.

No. The mask hasn't fallen away. It's in his hand. He's pulled it off.

And he's gagging, which means he's responsive.

I frantically look up into his face and find that his blue eyes are open, though they're just tiny slits.

"Peeta!" I gasp, pulling his eyelids back and checking his pupils. They dilate and then contract back to pinpoints a few times, then finally even out.

And I just know it's him. It's the old Peeta. The transfusion worked.

A second later he vomits the stomach tube right out.

"Peeta!" I cry out again, quickly sitting him up so he doesn't choke. His eyes open a little wider and he looks right into my face. Then his dry lips part and seem to form a word, but no sound emerges. He tries again, with great effort, and one sound comes out, cracked and broken:

"H-ome."

"Yes! Yes, home, Peeta! We can go home!" I cry out, bursting into tears and laughter at the same time. So he had heard! He could hear me all this time! I want to throw myself into his arms, but I hold back at the last minute, knowing that he's still frail, and covered in vomit, and the ventilation machine is still emitting a shrill sound which will attract the attention of a nurse at any second.

I quickly jump up and rip the machine's plugs from the wall, then lock the door, buying us a little more time alone. I know that as soon as the doctors find out that Peeta's conscious again, they will just take him away from me in order to do more tests. And I'm not ready to part with him just yet.

He says a few more words that night. "Home" and "Ka-niss" and "Water." He also shakily lifts his fingers to my throat and sadly touches the last of the yellowing bruises that circle my neck.

"It's okay," I reassure him, so he doesn't have to speak. "You were sick when it happened. You didn't mean to. I'm okay now."

I clean him up and re-dress him in a fresh hospital gown, then lift a plastic cup of water to his lips. It sort of dribbles everywhere, but he sighs in relief afterwards, so it must've felt nice on his parched throat. Then I climb back into bed with him and cling to his chest and try not to cry too hard as I confess how much I've missed him.

"Kiss," replies Peeta simply, with a faint smile. I lift my head and smile back at him, then lean in close and gently press my lips to his. They're warm and dry and a little chapped. He only kisses me back with the faintest of pressure, but it's enough.

Peeta has come back to me.

* * *

Peeta drifts in and out of sleep for the rest of the night. His brief bursts of consciousness seem to completely exhaust him, so I let him rest. But I stay awake the entire time, watching the rise and fall of his chest and listening to his steady breathing.

I'm still guarding his life, just like I did in the arena.

Just before dawn, his eyes pop open and he says, "Su-shine."

"Sunshine? You want to see the sunrise?"

Peeta smiles affirmatively.

I find a wheelchair just outside in the hallway. Back in the room, I affix his IV drip to the wheelchair's pole and unwrap the compression cuffs that have been keeping the blood circulating in his legs the whole time that he's been lying down. He's grown so thin that I can easily support him, and I lower him down as gently as I can into the chair. Then I tuck a blanket around his legs and discreetly wheel him into the hall, towards the elevator that's farthest away from the nurses' station.

When we get up to the top floor, I wheel him into a vacant living compartment and lift the blinds on the tiny window. Sunlight floods in, making us both squint.

"The woods here aren't as pretty as the ones at home," I think aloud, pulling up a chair next to Peeta and taking his hand in mine. His fingers are chilly. "But it's still nice to be able to look out and see the trees."

"Home," Peeta sighs.

"Yes," I agree, resting my head on his shoulder.

"Home," Peeta says more insistently. "You. Sorry."

"Sorry?"

"St-ory," he clarifies, his throat still raw from the ventilator tubes.

"Oh," I smile, remembering this same conversation from the cave in the first arena, when he'd requested a story and I'd told him about Prim's goat, Lady. "Well, did I ever tell you about the time I that I was out hunting and I got treed by a skunk? It didn't even spray me, but my hunting gear still reeked for weeks afterwards."

Peeta smiles weakly and makes a coughing sound which might be laughter.

I know how he likes to picture things, so I lace my story with lots of little details - how the sap on the tree had stuck to my hands, how the sun warmed the top of my head, and how the skunk eventually trundled off and disappeared under a dew-covered fern.

I'm so busy with the details that I don't even notice when Peeta nods off to sleep again.

I wish I'd known that it would be the last time.

* * *

Peeta Mellark passed away that morning while sitting next to me. Holding my hand in the morning sunshine. Listening to stories about home.

It was the same day that the Republic of Panem was officially born. So he survived two arenas, a hijacking and a war, and he got to see the first sunrise of the free world at the end of it all.

For years I have struggled with guilt, wondering if calling a nurse earlier in the night might've extended Peeta's life, or if more medical prodding would've only ended it sooner. Sometimes I still wake up in a cold sweat with my stomach in knots, weeping over nightmares that I can't quite remember but which I know have something to do with him.

But I cherish those last few hours we had together, and I don't regret them. They weren't televised. They weren't for the sake of some cause. They were just for us, and they were free, and they were real.

Peeta didn't die as a piece anyone's game.

After Prim, my mother and I returned to District Twelve, Gale came by one day with a wheelbarrow full of earth and planted dandelions and yellow flowers all around the front of our house in memory of Peeta.

And that's where I buried his little box of ashes – safely in the yellow garden. The same one that may wither and turn grey each winter, but which springs forth again each summer and vibrantly reminds us all that there is hope in the darkest of seasons.

And that life goes on.

_The End_


End file.
